Grandpa, it's soooo hard to except the fact that your gone. I am so happy my family and I got to visit with you one last time, 1 week before our lord and savior called you home. I'm so thankful to have experienced such a TALENTED, FUN, LIVELY, WISE, and GENIUS grandfather. I will take the talent you blessed me with, every lesson you taught me, every loooooong talk you gave me , and all of your words of encouragenment & wisdom, and apply it for the rest of my life. I'm gonna miss the random moments we would go out for a day on the town. Going out for chinese food and us ordering shrimp fired rice with NO PEAS

 You taught  me that nothing is impossible, no matter who tries to knock you down. I'm gonna keep on pushin just like you told me to PAW PAW. I LOVE YOU and you are definately missed.

~Thank you lord for my grandfather and keeping him uplifted through the storms and blessing him with such a talent that touched and changed many lives. We may not always understand why are loved ones are called home when we least expect it, but it is these things that will bring us and keep us closer to you lord. I thank and  I praise you for your mercy, grace, and peace you gave him in his lifetime. Amen~

I LOVE and MISS YOU PAW PAW!!!

I want to share this memory with the whole world because I believe it will reveal a side of Ike that the majority were totally unaware of.

While working for Ike and Tina at Bolic Sound in 1972, Ike got word from someone that "The Big One" (the big earthquake in Los Angeles) was about to occur on a particular date. Ike like so many other people believed him. So he gathered together ALL of his family, musicians and every one of his employees and told us that he was going to fly all of us to Las Vegas to escape the earthquake. There were around 25 of us. He was serious. He emptied all of his bank accounts and we all got on a plane
to Las Vegas, stayed at the Hilton, had our own rooms, ate and gambled and every single dime was on Mr. Turner! After a few days passed, since there was no earthquake, we all flew back to L.A.

Now the point is that Ike could have just saved his own hide and that of his family. But Ike was not a selfish man. He was more generous than you can imagine unless you knew him well. To this day, I still remember and tell about this true incident because it made an indelible impression on me and is forever in my memory.

In fact, when I last spoke to Ike on December 6, I reminded him about that whole Las Vegas incident and I told him how he could have just left everyone behind and taken care of his himself. We laughed about it. I said, "Ike, you are a class act." He smiled and thanked me on the phone. That was my last conversation with Ike which I will always remember for as long as I live.

Annette Walker

Ike, a little extreme to get out of our morning beach walks don't you think!

I will miss your uncanny ability to see ME, the way that we did not have to use words express what was going on in our lives, feelings & thoughts, sharing that connection that rarely happens - we could just be. I truly do love you, and I know that you loved me too. Your kind words, and the hugs for no reason when I needed them the most and the silly songs you sang to me just to see me blush but really I think it was just to make my heart smile. You were such a deep soul Ike, devoid of judgment of others as you took people how they came, I so admired that. Ike I wrote a little something for you as I always did on your big occasions so here we go.

"Ike you will not journey alone, your hand will be held by those who love you, guiding you home Don't be afraid Ike, as you enter the stage, you will be received with open arms, warmth & joy. Pains of the past & judgment will be no more, your spirit will soar and become whole, you will be healthy and well. You will sing with Kings, in boundless breath, overlooking magnificent vista's your best gig yet. I just ask just one simple please, that you visit us be it a gentle breeze or the song in our heart that you are still with us in love, spirit and heart"

Ike and Fender have had a long term relationship as Ike was a devotee Fender fan, can you say Stratocaster?

Though out the years Fender has supplied Ike with his infamous guitars in which some of the best Rock N Roll was penned including Rocket 88.

Ike & Fender teamed up on multiple charity events as well, auctioning off signed guitars and more.

The last official artist found by Ike Turner. "the father of Rock n Roll"...with young  pioneering "Soul Hip-Hop"  emcee.  M.C. LYONLU   aka: Justin James.  Ike Turner, world  renound talent spotting guru had actually signed LYONLU under a promotional contract.  Ike said with conviction the young emcee would be his next big act, he"d say...... " as big as Eminem," and lyonlu would grin and say, " thats right Ike, only even bigger..."

When I was 14 years young, I saw Ike and Tina  on TV., told my mother, "That's what I need!"  Later that same evening, mother played Jimmy Smith record, I told her, "I AM going to sing with him!" 

Well in 1977, November 3rd, I met Ike Turner and Jimmy Smith the same day...........and hired by both to sing the same day! Ike Turner, was one of the best people that the spirit of GOD did put in my life....he never hit me, never approached me in any disrespectful way and I was never his girlfriend!  In fact, I know now, that I was his counterpart as far as having a brain is concerned and being exceptionally specially musically talented.

There are so many wonderful memories I have and would love to share with the world about Ike...One day I will! To Ike Turner:  You will Forever live in my brain and in my heart...."Bigga Than Me!"  "Spook!"......Holly Maxwell  now Holle'Thee Maxwell

My friends,
Tonight is the night in which I rejoice.  My beautiful daughter Natalie has turned 21 years of age today.  She no longer needs to listen to me!!! So I can talk freely about Ike Turner. (haha) Yes,  before I went to her birthday gathering I learned that Ike Turner died today.  I know that in my depths I do rejoice the vivid life he had and that he shared a portion of himself with me.  I know that I loved him.   I know that there is a bridge between us that I must build for you to feel those feelings of why I say that.   It is torturous and it is not linear.  Tonight,  in honor of Ike and Natalie,  I will make that attempt.  

A small portion of you who I correspond with know that I worked with Ike to make a record or two( and a little bit more. We made a record in 2001 called "Here and Now"  As opposed to then and there (Tina) I experienced the beautiful days of that process.   Not unlike a resurrection.  17 years and then back to the front lines.  Publicity(Thanks Shorefire) Radio ( Hot 97 and Paulette and Don Graham)  

It started with Jim O'Neil of Living Blues and Rooster Blues fame.  He took me to meet Ike.  Ike was the talisman and the mecca of Jim's idea of the majesty of the blues.    Jim was right.   Moment after moment during our first meeting in Ike's music studio/family room in San Marcos, California the music was spellbinding.   As we rose to say a polite goodnight,  Ike would not release us. He stood at the guitar and played a violent solo.  Ike's Theme he called it.  He played it with a vehemence of a conjurer looking for a tribe to heal.  Do not leave me it cried.  It was a stunning statement of desire.

I never responded to Ike the man at that time.    In my mind's eye was the responsibility to the gift the music god gave us in Ike Turner. The music was my altar.  He was a living homage to the worship of music. I looked straight through the social ramifications.  This man was sent by the gods to play music. 

That is a gift so profound that:
Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton testified to its essential influence on their careers.   Ever hear or see graffitti that said  "Clapton is god"   I did.  Following a record called John Mayall and the BluesBreakers with Eric Clapton.     He played a song on that record entitled "All Your Love"  and it inspired our love.   It was an old Otis Rush song.   But as those of us around Barry Bonds would say there was an asterisk.  Asterisks represent social doubt.   The asterisk that Willie Dixon could tell you all about is that All Your Love was created in a place where Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were backing Otis Rush.   All Your Love was at least co authored by Ike Turner and was taught to Eric Clapton of the Yardbirds by Ike.  (Ike tells of coming around a dressing room corner and hearing Clapton practicing.  He exclaimed "That White Boy plays like a spook"  He met and taught Eric a song he felt would amplify Clapton's profound skills.  It did) 

Stevie Ray Vaughan named his band Double Trouble in honor of a feeling derived from another of the songs of Otis Rush.  Guess what?   Ike plays the guitar solo on that song.  Who was it that inspired Stevie's naming of his band?

Joe Bihari accompanied me with is daughter when I touched the soil of my 50th state, Arkansas. We drove across the bridge from Memphis to finish that silly goal.    Joe told stories of Ike and the essence of recorded music emanating from Elmore James,  BB King and Howlin Wolf (Piano man as Mr. Burnett called him on House Rockin Boogie).   He could not stop exuding enthusiasm for the genius of what we shared in the experience of working with Ike.  

Listen.  Watch.  PBS Martin Scorsese Blues.  Ike in Sun Studios interviewing Sam Phillips.  One of the great moments in America cultural history (thanks Alex). Marc Levin filming Ike on the left hand with Pinetop Perkins,  Ike's piano teacher, playing the right hand at the Chicago Blue Festival.  Hundreds of people crying.    I was backstage and saw their eyes dripping.  Everywhere.  OVERPOWERED.   At the end of the set,  Ike walked off stage.  There was a chant.  "We like Ike, We like Ike"   Eisenhower riff. Silly.   He honored that curtain call.  What the world did not see was a child in the man who walked off stage after that ovation crying.  Sobbing.  He embraced me and shook to his core.  He looked into my eyes and said"  Robert Johnson,  I never, ever thought I would ever hear that sound, or feel that feeling ever again".  He did.   He earned it.

 Headwinds were beginning to become tailwinds.  Redemption and forgiveness. 

He had generously honored Pinetop and the Grant Park world loved his capacity to love.  They honored his loving capacities.  It was so tangible.   Capacities that were hard to believe were true if you had watched "What's Love Got to Do with It" and capacities that were hard to believe existed if you had known he had watched that terrible distorted movie himself and knew in his imagination what people believed about him. Yet they were there, those capacities.   It is remarkable that he had endured it and had a capacity to love.  And a capacity to experience feeling loved.  Vulnerability is real hard to do.  

The Blues rode this man's genius.  Tina did too.  Elmore James, BB King, Otis Rush,  Buddy Guy.  Howlin Wolf.  Robert Nighthawk had the "young genius" playing the piano with him when he was 11 years old on the radio ( probably to save money but so be it the boy could play)
I rode his blues genius energy too.  Like a bankrupt company that he was, and the nothing in music that I was, we joined to turnaround his career and invigorate my music label.  Yet nothing is so superficial and goal driven as that suffices to explain who we are, were,  in that moment.  I excavated a texture of life from this experience that you cannot pay for.  I became comfortable that I was not inside and that I bore witness to this greatness.   I was a proper man of the left after all.  Ike was not exactly politically correct.  I knew I was bringing truth to prejudice. Musical truth.  Not political branding.  Ike.   We built together. I saw him get up off the mat and go for it again after he had been destroyed.  I watched and felt and cajoled and supported every moment of his struggle.  But make no mistake it was Ike who was at the center of that struggle.  It was Ike who had to Climb the Higher Mountain, as Aretha once sang.   But he did.  His last act would not be abuse of himself or another.  He struggled to transmit his gifts.   

Examples:
Dinner at the Belle Haven Club in Greenwich Connecticut.
Ike is sitting at the club when a couple comes to this ever so aristocratic venue and shouts out," Are you Ike Turner? ( yes ma'am) We had our first date in Lawrence Kansas at an Ike and Tina concert!"   The crowd assembled and we ended up back at my house with cell phones screeching and 35 people gathered around a piano with Ike Turner and his girl Audrey playing and singing for the elite Greenwich crowd a concert deep into the night.  They were ecstatic. 

Sun Valley Idaho.
Ike Turner is anxious and tired.  I take him for a retreat to Sun Valley Idaho.  He knows he is the only black man in the area.  We hold a dinner at my house in the Lake Creek Canyon.   Bruce Willis and others are abuzz that Ike is in Ketchum.    My culinary friend and baker Rob Kabeary(who got a piano lesson from Ike)  makes a dinner on the deck.  Ike walks out.  He sees us all.  Gently he comes up to me and whispers "Rob can everyone come to the living room.  I want to make the dinner better"    I ask all 14 people to file in.  Ike turns on an amplifier and he sits at the piano.   We assemble.   He goes into a frenzy on the piano.  A furious blues.  Piano blues becomes guitar blues.   People,  adults, are jumping on the couch.  A frenzy.  Ike knows he can do this and does.   What appears to be spontaneous wildness is in fact contained within his fingertips.   

We finish and move to the deck.   Ike walks up to me and he takes his hand like a claw.  He starts to beat on my heart.  Literally.  It hurts a bit to have some one pound on your chest.   He then utters in sequence with his pounding. "You created a beautiful dinner for me and I wanted to put something in side of you all to show you I know you are doing it"   He says it in a cadence that is sychronized with the urgent pounding on my left side.   

It was an unusual way to say grace but it was powerful.  The dinner was in orbit. 

Encinitas California.  
Lesbian reporters enraged that anyone would work with Ike Turner.  I invited them to cover his rehearsals along with the GQ reporter and entertainment tonight.    Mexican restaurant beforehand.  Anger and accusation.  Good guacamole helps.   We wander down to the rehearsal.  Ike does not know the tension that entered the room ( I did not feel it productive to share this with him ex ante)   He goes into "5 long years"  with the band.  He is very hard on the horn section.   Then he breaks into a solo.  Kevin on bass is the first I see. Piano solo produces tears.  Ike buries himself for about 8 minutes.  Then he leans back and without standing changes from Piano to Guitar solo.   Six of the eleven players in the and start to cry.   The four reporters I am with who came in predisposed to knife Ike are crying too.   It is not a choice it is a power.   
Ike was a witch doctor,  a conjurer.  A shaman.   He had powers through music that I did not comprehend how to create but I felt them in his presence.  He commanded them.  Like I breathe.    He was, like many who are genius,  afraid of those powers too.   They led to his excess.   He could get away with things in life that we could not.   He talked about it often.   One Saturday we sat on Sunset Blvd together at a cafe and he was treated like royalty.   People walking by.  Horns honking "yo Ike"  and autograph lines at the table.    He did not know what to do with them.  

I was wary in this regard.  I did check out Ike before working with him.  No drug tests were negative since getting out of jail.  No repeat incidents of spousal  abuse.  The latter surprised me given the propensity to repeat patterns in that realm.   San Marcos, California
I watched Anton Corbijn work with him for the photos in Entertainment Weekly.  I felt them touch.  Corbijn's shot of Ike in front of a portrait of a younger Ike still gives me chills.  Genius upon Genius seen and captured by genius.  I stood in the living room and saw the shot imagined by Corbijn and the dance as Ike saw what was being asked.  The photo took place after Ike sensed Corbijn was in a good emotional state.   Corbijn was pleased and left soon after and Ike turned to me and described his awareness of the magnetic pull of Corbijn's energy working to that pose as he himself saw the power of it.  I marveled as Ike was so able to share his feelings about the lining up of a photo that I observed a genius create.  His awareness was profound.

Later that night,   Ike showed me the tape of Soul to Soul.   Watching the energy that Tina excavates from her self as she (presciently)  smells trouble in the soul of her expression and lyrics as works in a duet with Ike.  Spellbinding.   Ike was kind of proud of how much BLUES he as able to cull from the spirit of Tina.   They reached and they had a stupendous power.  They went so deep and so far.  He was her Shaman.  
You knew how far they went.  How deep he was.  When you saw the likes of Van Morrison, Paul McCartney and three of the Rolling Stones at the edge of the stage in awe of this man.   They were like high school groupies in front of the quarterback.  Buddy Guy and BB King were more circumspect but each of them told me in an aside that they were no match for the genius of Ike Turner in the musical realm.  B. B King says Ike was the greatest bandleader he ever saw.    They prayed he could keep it on the rails and develop the consistency touring to cultivate a fan base such as their own.   

So you have indulged me and allowed my to share with you my remembrance of him.  Anecdotes.   Yet I know that none of that really tells the story of why I was willing to immerse myself in this context.   If the truth be told I do not know myself the answer to that question.  I search for it and I can try to convey my hunches.   Ike left us tonight and I have to try to get to that place.  For me.   
I grew up in a family where everything was successful and accomplished.  No one ever did anything society would say was "wrong" yet we had a lot of emotional violence within our walls.   A lot.   Not unlike America today.   Lots of laws and lawyers and economists acting like in the long run this torrential stream of wreckage and violence is somehow beneficial.  While the population gets smashed and a handful of people reap all of the benefits.   It feels like a lie.   Our society and my formative family.   Both.  
Yet I leapt over the walls.   My family was a lie and I was living in Detroit.   Race riots, Teamsters,  Walther Reuther's death and the UAW and anti war tension.   Pristine economic models always pretended that everything that happened was disembodied and inevitable.  Beyond our power.   There was no human agency.  Economics preaches frictionless inevitability.   It is a lie in that specification.  I let myself go to that place in my education.   Economics and markets and technology and inevitability.  Obedience to power it all is.  
Within my family there was agency un-exercised and maintenance of appearances in lovely Grosse Pointe was the order of the day.  And in our economy and body politic the patina of inevitability was smashed by the human conflict of Detroit. I was stampeded by elephants in the room. Unspoken.   At home and in the society.   No one looked and the message of despair that is Detroit is not acknowledged.  In my home we pretended.
      Ike acknowledged his contradictions.   I feel safer around him and that than I do immersed in a society and a family of denial.    I am much better with honest bad news than with denial of bad news when it is all around me  

What does this have to do with Ike?   Ike was turbulent,  at times evil, violent, and more.  But he carried those dimensions within himself.   He embodied them as part of his humanity.  He did not deny or walk away from who he was or who he had been or was capable of being.  I found Ike Turner refreshing.  A bit like Matt Taibbi's writing.  Unmasking.  
He saw his own demons.  He lived them within himself and did not disavow them or run for cover from them.  They were part of him.   That he could do that scared people.  They could be involuntarily jumping on couches because of what he could compel them to do but they could not live with his capacity to live with his demonic side.   That awareness and wholeness was what I sensed propelled the Blues within him. Great artists are great because they are different.  Blues is the music of Hear and Now.  No promise of the afterlife.   Humanity is affirmed by expression of the feelings buried within.  In defiance of society, taboos and elephants in the room.   Ike was a great blues artist.  One of the greatest.   One cannot separate that from his being.  You do not get the art without the spirit.  

I have never for a moment felt that Ike was sadistic in his motivation.  He was a prisoner of his own fears.  (Fears that were amplified by the chorus of hatred following that awful film "What's Love Got to Do With It"

What a sham to pretend that was a documentary.  

Yet he was not just a prisoner of his own fears.  He was caught in the social matrix of our own fears of him because he represented a part of ourselves we would not touch.  Ike Turner scared us because he was a reflection of who we were capable of being.  He could live with it and we could not.   Yet society closed in on him after a film drove him into an untenable place as social pariah.  OG my ass.  We burned him at the stake and he had to go on living to see himself image like in flames in perpetuity. 

If you were around him up close you saw things.  Kindness.  Ask Little Richard.  He fought to get Louis Jordan his royalties.   He took the corrupt studio system on with Bolic Studios and all of the black musicians came there along with Mick Jagger.  Sly Stone,  Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and the young Prince Rodgers Nelson ( The Artist subsequently Known as Prince) all were on the premises until the studio was burned down.  Ike was accused of torching it himself.  Yet no one ever found that he had an insurance policy.  He did not.  He lost 2 million dollars when it burned.  

Ike was difficult,  no saint as they say.  I have scratch marks on my neck for sure.   But he was a truth serum not unlike that duality of beauty and war so well represented in the book "A Terrible Love of War" by the Jungian scholar, James Hillman.   ( read his book "The Dream and the Underworld"  from 1979 for a course in the Blues and Ike Turner)
The essence of Ike Turner was that he had a genius and we could not refuse to pay attention.  He compelled it.   Yet when we did, we did not like what we saw in ourselves.  We did not like and could not make peace with what we were attracted to.  He showed us a mirror and we did not like what we saw.  And the minute we disavowed his image, the piano or guitar came back to us and lured us in.  

Longtime friend and producer Gerhard Augustin called Ike a sorcerer.   He told stories of Ike seeing things within our souls that he felt compelled to tease out of everyone he encountered.  He did not do this for sport.  He was compelled to challenge  you.  He saw and knew things about us that we could not see in ourselve and he brought them out of us, however painfully.   

Ike asked me if I was a masochist.  Not literally but in every ounce of what he challenged me with.  He took my kindness to a limit where in Ann Arbor Michigan,  with my father and mother in the car,  I had to get out and tell him that I would not bend any more.  I thought he was dreadful in that moment.  In front of my parents.  What was I going to do, get out and punch a man who was 72 years old after he had performed a masterful set in the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival?
I did not hit him.   I ended our contract.  I told him then and I persevered.   I wanted so much to succeed in resurrecting his career.  Redemption and honesty compelled me to continue.   Ike called that bluff.  He asked me to respect myself.  

I did.  It hurt.  I love him.   I remember that moment in Ann Arbor every day of my life.  He did not let me just attach to his honesty as though it were my own.   He challenged me to do something much more painful and harder.  To define myself and own my own honesty.   
I am grateful for him.  Gerhard you are right.
God Bless Ike Turner.  
"The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom"
Blake got that right
What a ride
Thanks for hearing me.
It hurts tonight.
RAJ